Wednesday, September 1, 2010

#8

The Madness of the Crowd #2

Covering the hardcore, powerviolence, and fastcore scene, The Madness of the Crowd is 14 pages of interviews, reviews and some musings on comic books. I found myself a little irked with the zine's layout; page space wasn't maximized and there were large chunks of virgin white and seemingly random photo clippings. Things could have definitely been condensed down to less pages or a smaller size, but seeing as it's a free zine, I shouldn't be bitching about it. Well worth checking out if you dig the genres it covers.

Groups that attempt to blend drone and noise generally fail miserably, resulting in what sounds like harsh noise played at ½ speed. This is not the case with this cassette. TORBA starts things off with four tracks of drone that shifts between raw and hypnotic. Dotåbåtå fills the flip side with a single track that starts out as haunting, minimalist drone and evolves into a rumbling wave of sound before fading away. Take a note, this is how you do the drone noise thing right.

Wow, this is some jangly techgrind right here. From what I can gather, vessels cast in crippled hands put out two releases, broke up, and now, half a decade later, their discog has been released. To really appreciate these guys, you've got to be more than just a casual fan of technical sounding stuff. In fact, I can see a lot of people being turned off by them. It'll be your loss.

As much as I prefer vinyl format over cds, this is something that should have been released on the latter. You've got 100 powerviolence, thrashcore, grind, and noisecore bands ripping thru songs under 30 seconds and, after about the first 10 tracks on either side, you've not exactly sure what band is playing. Also, with 100 bands, there is a wide difference in track sound quality, as well as a fair amount of just plain weak groups. This is one of those 'good idea in theory' things that never manages to work out in the real world. On top of that, the label that released this has (at the time of writing this review) closed down it's website with numerous people complaining on the interwebs about having not received the orders they paid for.